Say Yes to Murder by Todhunter Ballard (pride and prejudice read .TXT) 📕
- Author: Todhunter Ballard
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Book online «Say Yes to Murder by Todhunter Ballard (pride and prejudice read .TXT) 📕». Author Todhunter Ballard
MOVIE EXECUTIVE QUESTIONED IN DOUBLE MURDER
Glancing down the double fourteen-point column, Lennox saw that he was the movie executive. The reporter had not spared the horses. Bill didn’t blame him.
Several motives were hinted at. According to the account, Lennox seemed to have been living a double, or even a triple life, complicated by Heyworth who also was playing around in the same general locations.
“There were three girls,” the paper said. “… the police have questioned a well-known star, Kitty Foster, and they are hunting for Jean Jeffries, dancer granddaughter of Mary Morris, in whose apartment the first murder took place.” There was even a picture of Jake. The police had searched him out and were holding him.
Lennox hadn’t known that. As soon as he could get to a phone he’d have to call Sam Marx and give the little attorney something else to tax his ingenuity.
There was also a column on Tina Kingstone. She was described as a soiled moth who had gotten too near the flame. Lennox grunted at this last. It was laying it on thick. Soiled moth, heck! A dragonfly who had been able to sting her victims fatally.
One thing in the paper annoyed him. It was a cautious interview with Spurck, in which the studio head had indignantly denied that he or anyone else connected with General had authorized or had known that Heyworth’s body had been moved. Lennox, he stated publicly, had been an unimportant employee. He no longer was with the studio, and Spurck had no knowledge of where he could be found.
The ax had fallen. And even though Lennox had expected it, knowing that Spurck could do nothing else, the thought rankled. He wondered what the next editions would say when the reporters learned from Spellman that Jean Jeffries had been located and questioned by the police.
Hollywood has no definite rialto. The studios are too scattered, as are the homes of the various workers in the industry, for there to be any one central meeting place. But there is a definite beat made by the regulars with the knowledge that in the places visited they will find sundry of their kind.
Lennox made the rounds. Usually in each place he would have been invited to a dozen tables and asked to join as many parties, but tonight Hollywood seemed strangely blind.
He might have been a rancher from Elca or a farmer from Sabina, Ohio, for all the attention he received. He was neither surprised nor considerably dismayed, for he knew he had committed the one unpardonable sin.
He had brought unfavorable publicity on the industry, also he had ceased to be of importance. He was now merely William Lennox, ex-reporter, ex-publicity man, ex-trouble shooter. No longer did he speak with the mouth of the powerful General Consolidated Studios.
After the fourth drink and the fourteenth snub he said: “To heck with this!” and rode a cab over to La Cinega to eat a piece of beef at Lowry’s. It was good beef, nice and red, and the giant potato which accompanied it was done to a turn.
He’d almost finished when a voice said: “Mind if I sit down?”
Lennox looked up, surprised that anyone should want to be seen with him. He saw Ed Strong and nodded. “Draw up a rock, Professor, and squat.” Not until the man had worked his way into a seat did Lennox realize how drunk he was.
The piano-player put both elbows on the table and leaned forward, grinning crookedly. “No one calls me Professor any more,” he confided, “not since I walked out on Madam Kelly in Chicago.”
Lennox grinned as he remembered the Kelly place. He’d drunk many a bucket of beer there in his early newspaper days. It had been a nice house—overstuffed furniture, a set of antlers above the mantel—and the beer had always been cold.
“You didn’t always play the piano in a joint, Ed. What did you do before that?”
“Vaudeville,” said Strong. He had a little difficulty with the word. “That’s where I knew Mary.”
Lennox nodded and watched while the man ordered a drink. “You’re about the only guy in town that has me on his list tonight.”
The man waved his cotton-gloved hand expressively. “Me,” he said largely, “I don’t care. You could kill eight guys, see, or even ten, and I wouldn’t care. What’s a little murder in my life.”
Lennox said, “But I didn’t.”
“Sure you didn’t.” The piano-player rubbed the side of his nose thoughtfully with a long finger. “Sure you didn’t.” He winked with drunken gravity. “Got a little business.” He seized the edge of the table and managed to drag himself to his feet. “Very important business. No smarty is going to fool Ed Strong. Not for long.”
Lennox said: “You’d better go home and sleep it off. The business can wait.”
“No,” said Strong. “Things are cooking, pal-o, cooking with gas, and there ain’t no one to stop them but me.” He turned, sighted carefully for the door, and started swayingly toward it.
Lennox watched him go, a frown of worry creasing his forehead. Ed Strong was no affair of his. The man could sleep in the gutter for all of him, but he couldn’t get the fact out of his mind that out of all the people he knew in Hollywood, only this piano-player had bothered to speak to him that night.
With a muttered oath of self-annoyance he rose, gathered up his check, and hurried toward the door. He was just in time to see Strong being boosted into a cab which then pulled out into the heavy cross-town traffic.
Lennox had the feeling that he was starting on a wild goose chase, but in his present condition, Strong could well get into trouble. He motioned to a waiting taxi and told the driver to follow Strong’s cab.
They crossed Wilshire and followed it on toward the edge of Culver City, where they turned left into Washington. Lennox frowned, for he had a hunch where the ex-professor was headed.
He knew Madam Honia’s joint as a great many other people in the movie capital knew it. The place was tough, a combination restaurant and bar, with gambling on the second floor.
He almost leaned forward and told his driver to turn back, then he shrugged. It was as good a place as any to spend a couple of hours, and if the piano-player got into a jam, he’d be there to help.
Madam Honia’s was busy as Lennox entered the big dining room. To the casual observer it looked like any other combination restaurant and night spot. The bar along the right wall was separated from the supper room by a series of arches through which the barflies could watch the show from their high leather stools against the dark counter.
Inside it was warm and noisy from an orchestra that scaled its accomplishments on volume, not performance. Lennox gave his hat to the check girl and said, “Hello, gorgeous,” as if he meant it.
He got a dimpled smile in return. “Hello, Mr. Lennox. You look like the devil. Murder doesn’t seem to agree with you.”
He said, “I should be drunk by now and I’m not,” as if that explained it, and moved on into the bar where he had a neat brandy.
Eddie Strong was nowhere in sight. Bill frowned, looking around. He didn’t know anyone at the bar, but several people in the supper room had turned their heads and then looked quickly away. He shrugged and moved toward the concealed door which opened on the stair.
Lennox’ lips thinned. It was beginning to get him. Just a friendly town, he thought. When the knife falls everyone greases the way down to the gutter.
He paused before the grilled window of the cashier’s cage and filled out a blank check for five hundred from a pad on the shelf. The man behind the grille took it in his soft white fingers and pretended to study it intently. Lennox watched him with narrow eyes.
“Don’t you read English?”
The cashier said: “Are you sure this is good, Mr. Lennox?”
“Heck, no!” said Lennox. “It isn’t good, and you know it. But I’ve never failed to pick up one yet, have I?”
The man shrugged. “Sorry. My orders are not to cash any more checks.”
“You mean mine?”
Again the man shrugged, and he pushed the check out through the little window toward Lennox.
Someone behind Bill snickered, and a voice said, too loudly: “Did you hear that Sol was getting a new office boy?” Several people were standing close enough to laugh.
Lennox apparently did not hear. “Is Kreach around?” he asked.
The cashier did not answer. Lennox picked up the check, folded it carefully, and slipped it into his pocket as he crossed the room, went around a corner of the small metal bar and through the curtained doorway behind it.
He went down a short broad hall toward where a man with too-black hair and startlingly white skin was reading a confession magazine. The man dropped the magazine and came out of the chair with catlike grace.
“You can’t go in there!”
The rage which had been smoldering in him for two days flashed to the surface. His hand snaked out, caught the front of the guard’s coat, and almost yanked the man from his feet as he was jerked close in.
“I’m going in, lousy.”
The man’s hand moved toward his pocket, but it never got there, for Lennox’ fingers were clamped about the slender bony wrist. “Try that and I’ll break you in two.” He pushed the man back into the chair with such force that it went over. The man’s head struck the hard floor with the sound of a falling coconut.
The guard rose dizzily, one hand to the side of his head. He glared at Lennox in sullen anger. “Why don’t you get wise to yourself?” he told Bill. “Your number is up in this town. You’re all through.”
Lennox did not answer. Instead he stepped past the man and pushed open the office door.
There was a woman standing beside the desk inside, and a man sitting in the swivel chair behind it. They both stared at Lennox as if he were an apparition straight from Mars.
Madam Honia was big and blond and well padded. She looked her part as thoroughly as Mae West ever portrayed a character, but she did not resemble Mae in any way. If anything, she was bigger, but there was no suggestive roll to her movements. She was quick—extremely quick for a woman of her size.
She overshadowed the seated man. He was small. His hair was black, and his black beady eyes were set in finely grained features. His face was split in the middle by a carefully waxed mustache.
The color came up under his sallow skin, and his eyes got dangerous, but he didn’t say anything. Then Madam Honia spoke.
“How did you get in here?”
Lennox’ grin was wholehearted. The guard had served as a whipping boy to work off his burning rage.
“I walked in.”
“Didn’t Toni tell you you aren’t welcome here?”
“Toni,” Lennox explained, “has a headache. I don’t think he feels very much like conversation at the moment.”
Her eyes locked on his. They were big and blue and almost glassy. He had never been aware of it before, but she looked remarkably like a horse—and not a good-natured horse. “All right. I’ll tell you that you aren’t wanted. Maybe you’ll believe me.”
Lennox ignored her. He walked directly to the desk. “The cashier turned down my check. I got the idea that he was acting on your orders.”
Kreach shifted his weight slightly. “We’ve had plenty of
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